Is Obama craving his own war?

Friday

Aug 30, 2013 at 6:00 AM

By Clive McFarlane

President Obama, the former senator who won the presidency partly on his prescient decision not to support the Bush administration's push to go to War in Iraq, seems prepared now to authorize military action in Syria.

The administration believes Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons in the fight against rebel groups try­ing to overthrow his regime. It was reported that hundreds of civilians were killed in a chemical attack last week.

Mr. Obama is pondering military action although he has only circumstantial evidence that it was Assad, rather than rebel groups that used chemical weapons.

He is talking military intervention even though UN inspectors in Syria have not yet concluded their investigations, and even though he has not clearly defined how America and its allies would gain strategically by such actions.

Drill down on the administration's reasons for military intervention and you will find that it is not to actually take out the Assad regime, or to even influence the outcome of the civil war, which is not surprising since over 60 percent of the rebel fighters in Syria are linked to one terrorist organization or another. The president's reason to strike militarily is also not about taking out chemical weapon sites, but, as he explained, to place 'a shot across the bow.'

By a shot across the bow, the president presumably means whatever action taken would be a signal to Syria and other rouge nations such as Iran and North Korea, that the U.S. has zero tolerance for the use of chemical weapons. It could also be a signal to Russia, an ally of Syria, that the U.S. is ready to protect its interests in the Middle East.

Yet, none of those reasons present a clear and present security threat to the nation, and if those become the reasons for military intervention, such an action could correctly be characterized as a 'war of choice,' rather than a 'war of necessity.'

'How do you go to war when there isn't a thread of threat against U.S. national security, and without involving Congress?' retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, Gulf War commander and Vietnam combat veteran, said during a television interview Thursday. 'It would be a disaster if it came out six months from now that we attacked another sovereign nation with faulty intelligence.'

That is a concern and a question senator, or presidential candidate, Obama would have asked. But now that he is the commander-in-chief he seems to have lost the ability to think clearly on the use of the country's military.

The National Rifle Association and others have often tried to blunt gun control efforts by saying 'guns don't kill people. People kill people,' which if you really think about it is a statement that heightens rather than lessens the urgency to have stricter gun control measures in place.

And indeed, we would have a much safer world if guns and other weapons, including weapons of war, were designed with some sort of built-in electronic DNA that would allow them to discharge only in the face of legitimate threats, or when they would only take out the bad guys.

As it is, our modern-day weaponry has no such controls. It is up to the possessor of a gun, or the leader of a nation's military to decide if and when to pull the trigger, and as much as we would like it to be otherwise, that decision, rather than being guided by legitimacy can often be overrun by ego, the desire to punish or to save face.

I never thought this president would ever allow himself to be ruled by the latter, but his intentions in Syria seem to say otherwise.